Big Sugar: fat, powerful and rippling with analogies ... by gimleteye

The American Heart Association doesn't have a soft spot in its heart for processed sugar. Nor should anyone else. "In a scientific statement issued Monday, the organization says most women should limit their sugar intake to 100 calories, or about six teaspoons, a day; for men, the recommendation is 150 calories, or nine teaspoons. The recommendations are likely to prove challenging for many consumers to meet. Just one 12-ounce can of cola has about 130 calories, or eight teaspoons of sugar. ... The heart association has encouraged consumers to moderate sugar consumption, but the new statement is the first time it has suggested specific limits." (Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2009)

There is a funny thing about sugar. It is so ubiquitous in our diets that it becomes hard to describe. Sugar is in the air we breathe. Not literally, of course, but the point is that Sugar invites a thousand comparisons and analogies. Here are two: the American taxpayer and voter has allowed Congress and White House to lick the sugar stick like hamsters on a water dispenser laced with nicotine. Comparing the sugar lobby to tobacco is not far from the truth.

In a 2007 editorial, the Orlando Sentinel called the sugar provision in the Farm Bill, "a shakedown". Why are we so willing to be shaken down and suffer health consequences at the same time? A friend of mine just returned from Switzerland. In an informal airport survey, he noticed an immediate difference between the airport crowd in Switzerland and the US airport where he landed: obesity. Just plain fat. We have turned into a curious nation, jiggling with layers of excess. America doesn't manufacture much. We leave that work to low cost labor nations. Much of the technology that we rely on is now made in other nations, too. We have a lot of government employees and a bloated health care system filled with intermediaries. We make airplanes, weapons and wage wars on behalf of the free world. And we fuel our ambitions with sugar.

"For decades, a federal program has protected the U.S. sugar industry by propping up its prices. The sugar program has been a sweet deal for the industry, and a rip-off for just about everyone else." (Sugar Shakedown, Oct. 26, 2007, Orlando Sentinel) To be clear, this "shakedown" has its companion analogies in state politics. When Gov. Jeb Bush encouraged the Florida legislature to re-write the legal agreement forged in the early 1990's between the US government and Florida and sugar producers polluting the Everglades, there were more lobbyists employed by sugar patrolling the capitol hallways than Florida senators. And, back when I was leading the fight against the Homestead Air Force Base conversion to a privatized commercial airport in Miami-Dade and trying to arrange a press conference at County Hall, it was a sugar lobbyist who intervened with then commissioner chairwoman Gwen Margolis to shut down the event.

In a 2005 editorial, the Wall Street Journal wrote: "U.S. sugar policy has also harmed the environment by encouraging overproduction. Florida's Everglades have been damaged enough by runoff from sugar cane fields that a $300 million water treatment facility will be required to clean it up. But the sugar industry will pay less than one-third of that cost, while taxpayers pick up the rest, especially Floridians who have a new line on their property tax bill. Think of it as a second sugar tax, after the first tax of higher sugar prices. What's astonishing about all this is how much damage is being done to so many for the benefit of so few. A handful of cane and sugar beet growers in a few states benefit the most, and one key to their success is their ability to dole out campaign contributions. In the 2004 election cycle, Florida's Fanjul family, owner of mega-sugar producer Flo-Sun, gave $430,750 in political donations for a total Flo-Sun contribution of $573,700." (Bittersweet Trade, May 13, 2005, Wall Street Journal)

In yet another newspaper editorial against sugar policy-- I can't think of a single newspaper that has endorsed the sugar subsidy in the Farm Bill-- The Washington Post editorial page recently wrote, "Since 1982, domestic sugar producers have lobbied for, and gotten, a government-guaranteed share of the market. Today, their guaranteed share is up to 85 percent; the rest gets divided up among some 40 countries lucky enough to hold quotas of varying sizes. The advent of free Mexican imports upset this scheme somewhat, which is why the 2008 farm bill promised that the government would offset them by purchasing excess U.S. sugar and shipping it to ethanol factories. In addition, the federal government guarantees minimum prices for both raw cane sugar and refined beet sugar. Pretty sweet." (Washington Post, "Sugar's sickeningly sweet deal with the government", August 23, 2009) Well it is even sweeter. The Washington Post doesn't want to bore readers with the details of the failed ethanol bubble or sugar's welfare racket.

Sugar wields its outsized profits in South Florida, from spin doctors inventing "green" sugar packaging to PR flaks to big downtown law firms that have been sucking on the sugar-tipped tit for decades. It is playing a behind the scenes role in promoting the campaign of Marco Rubio against Gov. Charlie Crist, who angered Fanjul family sugar interests by entering into a land deal they deemed 'too sweet' with their chief competitor, US Sugar.

In a Herald puff piece, former Florida governor and US Senator Bob Graham discusses his new book, "America: The Owner's Manual". He cites the capacity of citizens to effectively change government. ("Yes, you can fight City Hall, August 25, 2009, Miami Herald") But while he was US Senator, when it came to standing up to Big Sugar on behalf of public health and the Everglades, Bob Graham hardly practiced what he now preaches.

On the big stuff, there are no differences between Florida's sugar growers. When they can't grow sugar, they will build inland ports, rock mines, or new suburbs.

The economic downturn has done nothing to lessen either sugar's influence or desire to knock down barriers to building whatever industrial facilities they want in historic Everglades wetlands. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Sugar is a classic case of what Milton Friedman once called the Law of the Few -- that in a democracy the intense interests of a few can often trump the diffuse costs spread among many." (Today, the Martin County Commission is taking up a new proposal to weaken growth management restrictions in the western part of the county; long a goal of sugar growers and land speculators.)

The Wall Street Journal reports, "Current food labels don't list sugar content in calories or teaspoons and don't distinguish between natural and added sugars." You can ask former Senator Graham or current US Senator Bill Nelson, why. I'm not sure they would admit that Big Sugar controls local and state politics with its sweet tooth along the lines of the popular HBO show, "True Blood"; where excess and sweetness interlock like legislators and sugar money after the sun goes down.


April 27, 2000

Sugar Industry Seeks Bailout,
Gives Money to Help Get Way

By BRUCE INGERSOLL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

WASHINGTON -- Never have old hands at the Agriculture Department
seen such a turnout: 11 U.S. senators trooping into Secretary Dan
Glickman's office to lobby for a big sugar-industry bailout.

"When you have 11 senators showing up," says Florida sugar-company
executive Robert Buker, "that's horsepower" -- enough power, he
believes, to push an ambivalent Clinton administration into an
unprecedented market intervention to bail out distressed U.S. sugar
producers.

The producers are floundering beneath a market-depressing glut of sugar.
Come October, they face another problem: a tenfold jump in Mexican
sugar imports. The federal sugar-loan program, which has cosseted them
for nearly two decades, is suddenly in danger of imploding.

So, to shore up the domestic market, sugar lobbyists are imploring
administration officials to authorize a bold sugar-buying spree. Only by
spending $100 million now to buy sugar and boost market prices, they
contend, can the government hope to head off a much costlier wave of
sugar-loan forfeitures later this summer, in the midst of an election
campaign.

Fighting the sugar lobby at every turn is a well-financed alliance of
consumer groups, candy makers, confectioners and other major users of
sweeteners. Their vision of the sweet hereafter is a deregulated sugar
industry, and they want the administration to let the market sink. Says Jeff
Nedelman, spokesman for the Coalition for Sugar Reform: "The whole
house of cards is starting to collapse."

The government has long managed to keep U.S. sugar prices far above the
world price, largely by curtailing imports of lower-cost sugar. That benefits
producers, obviously, though it also means consumers get stuck with a
price-support tab -- estimated at more than $1 billion a year -- in the form
of higher sugar, candy and soft-drink prices.

But in recent months, due to rising sugar plantings and improving yields,
prices have fallen below the guaranteed price-support levels of 18 cents a
pound for raw cane sugar and 22.9 cents for refined beet sugar. Lately,
prices are up a little in anticipation of a bailout. Under the loan program,
sugar processors who put up sugar as collateral are entitled to forfeit their
crop, keep the loan money and let the government eat the loss.

Processors are threatening to forfeit as much as 1.4 million tons of sugar
valued at an estimated $550 million. The sugar lobby's pitch to Mr.
Glickman and White House officials is that buying 300,000 to 350,000
tons immediately will give the market enough lift to avert massive forfeitures
at the end of August and September. "Sugar prices are at a 20-year low,''
says Sen. Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican. "The potential for loan
forfeitures ... is very real."

The senators visiting Mr. Glickman on March 26 -- all but one from major
sugar-producing states -- told the agriculture secretary that "he needed to
get on the stick," says Mr. Buker, senior vice president of United States
Sugar Corp., the nation's largest processor. On April 6, a dozen
sugar-state lawmakers met with White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.
They and the industry fear costly forfeitures would be a public-relations
debacle, sparking moves in Congress to scrap the shaky program.

Administration officials wouldn't be so hesitant about buying heaps of sugar
if they knew what to do with it. One option is to sell excess sugar on the
world market at cut-rate prices, but that would be just as controversial as
Europe's oft-deplored dumping practices. Another is to donate it overseas
as humanitarian aid, but so far no country has shown any interest in empty
calories.

Limited amounts could possibly be used for school lunches and other
feeding programs. The only other viable option is to use it as feedstock for
ethanol plants, but it would have to be dirt-cheap to compete with corn,
which sells for a nickel a pound.

Sweet Contributions

Top Sugar Daddies

1999 PAC, soft-money and individual contributions from sweetener industry

Archer-Daniels-Midland Co.
$405,000
Florida Crystals Inc.
$344,350
American Sugar Cane League
$144,750
United States Sugar Corp.
$144,040
Florida Sugar Cane League
$93,500
American Crystal Sugar Co.
$79,000
Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar
$74,150
Minn-Dak Farmers Co-op.
$59,050
Other Producers
$176,320
Total
$1,520,160


Competing Commodities

1995-99 PAC, soft-money and individual contributions by commodity group

Sugar Beets & Cane
$7,204,000
Livestock
$5,705,000
Dairy
$5,105,000
Fruits & Vegetables
$4,566,000
Poultry & Eggs
$2,914,000
Rice & Peanuts
$1,294,000
Cotton
$1,087,000
Grain & Soybeans
$665,000
Horses
$579,000
Sheep & Wool
$121,000

Source: Center for Responsive Politics

Diverting sugar into ethanol, a fuel additive, would displace corn, costing
farmers $100 million a year, the National Corn Growers Association
argues. They shouldn't have to "shoulder the burden" of bailing out sugar
producers, the association says.

Adding to the difficulty of a bailout is the opposition from politicians who
represent more sugar consumers than producers. Splurging on sugar would
be a "quick fix" of "dubious legality," 15 House members asserted in a
bipartisan letter. It would bestow a "bonanza" on processors, without
preventing forfeitures in the end, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman
Richard Lugar cautioned last week. The Indiana Republican also warned
that "dumping" sugar overseas would infuriate trading partners.

Ultimately, though, such considerations may not offset the political leverage
of Big Sugar, which gave Democrats and Republicans $7.2 million
between 1995 and 1999, more than any other commodity group in
Washington. The fact that the meeting with Mr. Glickman was attended by
New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli, who hails from a state with no sugar
growers but is chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee, highlights sugar's importance in an election year.

At least three sugar states -- Michigan, Ohio and Florida -- are seen as
being in play in the presidential race. Earlier this year, Florida Crystals
Inc., owned by the Cuban-born Fanjul family, gave Sen. Torricelli's committee
$50,000. Last July, Alfonso Fanjul hosted a $25,000-a-couple dinner,
attended by President Clinton, raising more than $1 million for the Florida
Democratic Party. Mr. Fanjul is renowned for calling up the president to
discuss sugar-related issues.

Particularly desperate are three big Hawaiian sugar-cane producers, Gay
& Robinson Sugar Co., an Alexander & Baldwin Inc. subsidiary and
Amfac/JMB-Hawaii Inc., whose first shipload of the season is due to
reach the mainland next week. Unlike their counterparts, they are
"price-takers," says their lobbyist, Dalton Yancey. Under an exclusive
contract with a refinery on San Francisco Bay, they are obligated to base
the price of arriving shiploads on the going New York price, no matter
how far it falls below the guaranteed price-support level. The contract
doesn't allow putting sugar under loan or forfeiting it.

Adding to the industry's problems is a looming surge of Mexican imports.
In October, under terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement,
Mexico will be free to ship 250,000 metric tons of low-duty sugar into the
U.S.

Despite more than a 20% drop in prices since 1996, sugar production is
still much more profitable than raising grain or cotton. The result is that
the nation's 10,000 cane and beet growers are shifting more land into sugar.
Their lobbyists portray them as suffering from agriculture's woes, including
crop failures and lost markets, when in fact most fare better than non-sugar
producers.

All told, the sugar problem threatens to haunt the White House and Vice
President Al Gore's presidential bid. It could complicate the coming visit of
Mexico's president to Washington, and could further hamstring U.S. efforts
to open up overseas markets for meat, corn sweetener and other
foodstuffs.

Ironically, the administration could have avoided the whole sticky mess.
But Messrs. Glickman and Podesta, under intense industry pressure, went
along with an administrative decision last fall to reinstate the guaranteed
minimum price, even though under a 1996 change in the loan program it
shouldn't have been offered to processors.

Now, the industry is arguing that "sugar is in crisis," in the words of Jack
Roney, economist for the American Sugar Alliance.

-- Jake Bleed contributed to this article.

Write to Bruce Ingersoll at bruce.ingersoll@wsj.com


U.S Sugar: Clean Up Your Own Mess

By Christine Stapleton
The Palm Beach Post
Friday, November 14, 2008

In the last month we -- the taxpayers -- have been told that WE have to pay
for the mistakes of others: at least $700 billion to Wall Street’s greedy
financiers; $25 billion to the walking anachronisms in Detroit; and $143 billion to AIG
for forgetting that insurance can be risky business.

So the measly $1.34 billion that WE will pay for a huge swath of heavily
polluted land at the south end of Lake Okeechobee doesn’t sound like much.
Neither does the estimated $44 million WE will pay to clean up the pollution
left by one of the nation’s most profitable and powerful companies: U.S. Sugar.

I am referring to the cost estimate of cleaning up 181,000 acres of land that
WE are going to buy from U.S. Sugar to clean-up the Everglades. U.S. Sugar -
the fabulously powerful and successful sugar-grower - has been allowed to
pollute its farmland for decades, while at the same time telling us that it
wasn’t really polluting its farmland for decades.

Yesterday the truth - or close to the truth - came out. It is going to cost US at
least $44 million to clean up U.S. Sugar’s polluted land before we can begin
using it to restore the waterflow between Lake Okeechobee and the
Everglades. Another clean-up estimate has the cost as high as $119 million.

WE know - from our recent experience with AIG, The Big Three and Wall
Street - that these estimates are lowball numbers. The cleanup will - in my
humble opinion - cost a lot more than $119 million because no Everglades
Restoration project comes in even close to budget.

Sure, U.S. Sugar will be responsible for decontaminating some of the land it
polluted with toxic fertilizers and pesticides - about 7,700 acres of about
85,000 acres that need to be decontaminated. The estimated cost of U.S.
Sugar’s portion of the cleanup: $25 million.

Carol Wehle, executive director of the South Florida Water Management
District, assured board members on Thursday that the district typically picks
up the cost of decontaminating land it uses for environmental projects.

“This is nothing different than we’ve always done,” Wehle said.

Paying the cost of cleaning up someone else’s mess just because it is
what “we’ve always done” is no longer a good enough reason to spend tax-
dollars. Maybe we need to try something different. This is a radical idea but
why don’t we make U.S. Sugar clean up its own mess?

It is called “personal responsibility.” Where I come from it would dishonorable
and shameful to make a mess and expect others to clean it up. My mother
drilled it into our heads when we were toddlers: “You make a mess, you clean
it up.”

Roll up your sleeves, Sugar Boys. It’s time to get to work.